How CCD Paved Its Path To Success Via Digital Marketing ?

About Company

CAFÉ COFFEE DAY, also well-known as CCD is the largest coffee retailer in India. It was started in 1996 by V.G Siddhartha.Coffee Day Company’s retail business consists of the Café Coffee Day chain, Coffee Day Xpress, Coffee Day Beverages, Coffee Day Fresh and Ground, and Coffee Day Exports. Pioneering the coffee café concept in India, Café Coffee Day was launched in 1996 as an Internet café and as a speciality coffee café. A very interesting aspect of this company is that, they hardly ever did any print, TV, radio or what you might call traditional media advertising. It does only Digital Marketing and in digital it does only web and social media advertising. Pinstorm built a strong base of loyalists for CCD by building out a Facebook group that is now over a million strong . All the publicity it got was through Digital Marketing or Advertising and word of mouth.They are very active on the social media platforms and hence immensely popular with the youth of this country. Today there are over 1450 Café Coffee Day stores in 200 cities in India where around 500,000 guests visit the cafes every day.

The Coffee Day Co. also has coffee curing and roasting facilities at two places in the Western Ghats, 200 km from Bangalore, with a curing capacity of 70,000 tons/annum and roasting capacity of 7000 tons/annum (soon to be upgraded to 12,000 tons/annum). Coffee Day’s coffee blends are created at the Coffee Lab at Bangalore (with more than 22 blends to their credit) and the production and packaging of all food and beverages used in the Café Coffee Day chain is handled by the R&D lab at Chikmagalur.

Business Objective

Café Coffee Day Lounges are targeted towards families, and the trendy affluent and offer more varieties of food (breakfast, lunch items etc.) and better ambience. The Café Coffee Day Square is the high-end café serving single origin coffees from across the world. It is targeted towards international customers and affluent Indian customers. The Coffee Day Xpress is the regular café with varieties of coffee, tea, cold beverages, and limited food options. It is targeted towards the youth and the average middle class Indian consumers. Currently there are over 900 Coffee Day Xpresses and many of them are at high-footfall and captive locations such as large corporate campuses, office buildings, hospitals, metro and railways stations, and so on.

CCD’s main objective is to grow more quickly in newer cities and continue to be the number one coffee cafe’ in the country and internationally too( there are two CCD café in Vienna and 14 in the Czech Republic) and also to build a loyal fan following and support for thought leadership in coffee, so as to withstand the competitors and new entries in the market like Costa’s, Tata Starbucks Ltd and Barista’.Coffee Day Fresh and Ground deals in retailing of fresh ground coffee. They also retail single-serve solutions in coffee in the form of capsules and sachet and the company has plans for more variants as well as aggressive expansion plans.Amalgamated Bean Coffee is among the top three exporters of coffee from India, and it is able to and aims to continue sourcing the best coffee beans grown in the country.

Strategy Adopted

Café coffee day , made coffee drinking popular among Indian youth by offering a brand experience environment and other value addition. They started by providing Internet facilities initially at the cafe’ ,during the year 2000 ,when internet was not easily accessible. They targeted the youth around the ages between 16-29 years and created a hangout place for a chit chat kind of experience. Since social media is most popular among the youth ,they decided to advertise only Digitally. That is only with the help of digital marketing ,they wanted to gain as many customers as possible.

Platform-wise strategy:- Facebook:Content-wise they are focused on promoting Cafe’ Coffee Day as a place to have conversations. Aptly supported by some good photography, they have expressive image updates to resonate with the vibrance on youngsters with good copy editing abilities of the team which writes their updates as well .

The Sit Down campaign is doing a good job at creating a buzz around the Internet. Thanks to their catchy YouTube video and the nice music, people have taken up to the concept of ‘Sit Down’. About their cafe’ , new menu , offers and events are conveyed through Social media .They are also focused on providing the best service at the cafe’ so that there isn’t, even a single negative remark by customers.

Results Achieved

In Facebook ,with 2 updates every day, they seem to be getting quite a good traction from their community. For a brand with more than 3 million people in its community, they boast a healthy 9% fan engagement for a month. We all know how difficult it is to get such traction when you have a really huge user base.Having generated more than 260k fan interactions in the 30 days, they are one of the most engaging Indian brands on Facebook. While, a huge chunk of these fan interactions are ‘likes’ but they are also able to pull off a lot many comments as well, which is a difficult ask.

Learning

With the help of social media and use of YouTube, CCD managed to reach a huge proportion of their target audience, increased brand awareness and engagement, and increased intent to buy. What’s more, a huge proportion of this success can be attributed directly to the use of social media and, above all else, YouTube. The marketing team at CCD understood their audience and marketed for them, not simply to them. This has eventually proved to be the most successful step taken.